The cabin needed heating, the route was uphill, and there was no home charging.
- Driving the Kia EV6 on this winter road trip was most enjoyable, but the charging experience was disappointing. We discovered a basic truth about public EV charging stations: Lots of them don’t work.
- Heading from San Francisco to Reno—uphill through the chilly Sierras—required charging sooner than anticipated because the steep grade and cold temps meant depleted range. But heading back downhill was easy peasy.
- The EV6 charges pretty quickly to 8o%, but that last 20% requires patience. When done, we were charged $19.55 for 31.845 kilowatt-hours. That comes to about $0.61/kWh—less expensive than an equivalent amount of gasoline.
Since American electric-vehicle owners tend to have home chargers for their machines, the question of EV operation using only public charging stations doesn’t come up as often as it might. On top of that, winter weather cuts down EV range. What’s it like to head out on a road trip over the Sierras in freezing weather, with just a 70-mile range cushion between starting point and destination and depending entirely on public chargers? I set out to learn these things with a 2022 Kia EV6 GT-Line RWD.
I’d had a 2021 Kia Niro EV (pictured above) to review in the San Francisco Bay Area last year, but I didn’t get the chance to take it on the long trips I’d planned. I liked driving it a lot and its near-300-mile range proved comforting as I hit the junkyards of the East Bay for my car-graveyard historical research.
I decided that I’d head back to the Bay Area, visit family, and go on a massive junkyard-scouring expedition up the Interstate 80 corridor, culminating in an overnight stay in The Biggest Little City in the World and a casino sports-book bet on a World Series game.
I asked Kia for another Niro, but all they had available that week was a rear-wheel-drive EV6. No problem, I told them.
I’ve been writing about my experiences driving EVs around the electron-driver-friendly Bay Area for close to a decade now, starting with the 2014 Mitsubishi i-MiEV and Tesla Model S and continuing through the years (tip: if you try to photograph a Chevy Bolt next to the Tesla factory, Tesla security staffers will come after you), and every one of those EVs came with an adapter to allow charging with ordinary 120-volt AC wall-outlet power.
I stay at the old family homestead when I visit the region, and I charge EVs overnight there with a 12-gauge extension cord plugged into a 20-amp outdoor outlet. The EV6 doesn’t come with such an adapter, so only chargers delivering 240-volt AC and up will fuel this car.
No sweat! I knew of an EVgo public charging station at a shopping center a mile or so from my mom’s house, equipped with fast-charging CCS connectors, so I went over to top off the batteries. There were two chargers there and one was open, so I plugged right in.
It’s pretty quick to get to 80% charge, but that last 20% requires some patience. When I was done, I saw that I’d been charged $19.55 for 31.845 kilowatt-hours. That comes to about $0.61/kWh, which was a lot more than the average $0.22/kWh charged to home users in the city of Alameda.
One of my mid-1980s Civics ate a front axle during a sketchy nighttime downhill drive in snow.
It’s still cheaper per mile driven than gasoline at the 61-cent price and at California gas prices in early November, but not by as much as I’d like (more on that later in this article).
Why drive to Reno from the Bay, aside from all the great car graveyards along I-80? I spent much of the early 1990s through early 2000s driving to Reno in various more-or-less-hooptie vehicles. I’d always bring along some camera gear and shoot some photos.
I’d get a cheap room at a casino hotel, lay down a couple of low-buck bets on games at the sports book, then enjoy free drinks and snacks while documenting the scene on a variety of modified film cameras.
This was a time of experimentation with homemade dual-camera 3D rigs and pinhole cameras for me, as well as a reason to shake down cheap Japanese cars I’d buy at the San Francisco towed-cars auctions and flip for a profit after making needed repairs. Here’s a late-1990s Reno casino pinhole photo on 35mm; I’ve since moved on to medium-format pinhole cameras made from Camry side mirrors.
I have a whole series of film photographs of dispirited, cleaned-out Reno gamblers from that period; someday I’ll have an art exhibit entitled The Faces of Defeat.
My friend (now brother-in-law) Jim had a bulletproof 1988 Toyota Truck with four-on-the-floor and rear-wheel-drive (yes, the official model name for the US-market Hilux really was “Truck” at that time) and enough sports knowledge to make wise decisions on betting lines, so we’d join up and drive his truck (or one of my Civics, Tercels, or Sentras) on some Reno trips.
We’d had some real automotive adventures during the dozens of times we took that Reno trip over the years, especially in winter.
The climb up to the infamous Donner Summit has some car-killing grades. Weather can be fiercely hot in summer and apocalyptically snowy in winter, and California drivers demonstrate a deadly combination of inattention and aggression that makes every mile exciting.
The EV6 has cool-looking fender bulges and thick pillars—all of which obscure your view.
One of my mid-1980s Civics ate a front axle during a sketchy nighttime downhill drive in snow on one trip, and we narrowly avoided countless crashes and spinouts caused by drivers who believed that all wheel-drive means you can go 85 mph in a blizzard.
Jim and I agreed that four- and all-wheel-drive was for the weak (my latest automotive acquisition, an AWD-equipped JDM Subaru Sambar kei van, has softened my stance on the subject), and so we’d always bring tire chains, full rain suits, heavy gloves, and a good floor jack along on our trips (I must admit that I also installed junkyard 4WD emblems on FWD Toyota Tercel wagons, because the CHP can be overly strict about chain-up requirements when there’s a quarter-inch of the white stuff on the ground; do not try this yourself).
When it became necessary to install tire chains, we never had to pay the chain monkeys to help us with our load; we’d suit up, jack up the vehicle, and throw on the chains in a matter of a minute or two. It was all very Formula One crew-ish.
So, there was the plan: I’d pick Jim up at the East Bay pad he shared with my sister in the morning of November 4 (the day of World Series Game 6). We’d hit several of the boneyards east of Sacramento, get lunch, and haul uphill to the Nevada line from there. Once in Reno, we’d stay in a nice room at the Silver Legacy casino hotel, where we’d been told there was free overnight charging for the EVs of guests who got valet parking (more on that later). Yes, we’d be high rollers. Whales!
Since I had the rear-wheel-drive EV6 and the forecast called for a chance of snow on our route, we brought along tire chains and rain gear (but no floor jack). What’s it like driving an EV with tire chains? We never got a chance to use them.
The interior of the EV6 gets a thumbs-up from us. It’s roomy, the materials seem like quality stuff, and the electric powertrain and slippery body make the ride soothingly quiet even at maybe-beyond-the-speed-limit highway speeds.
I wasn’t prepared for just how fast our predicted-range-to-actual-distance spread would shrink.
Acceleration from the 225 hp/258 lb-ft electric motor was impressive in Sport mode, much stronger than I thought those numbers should suggest. I wish Kia had seen fit to allow full application of torque from a standing start, for stoplight drag races, but you don’t get all that torque instantly off the line (if I had to guess the reason why, I’d say the sudden application of big electric torque requires stronger axle hardware than Kia wanted to use).
We just used the back seat to store our gear, but there’s definitely room here for two full-sized adults to sit in comfort (and three abreast can ride here, if they like each other).
My complaints about the EV6 experience boil down to two things: touchscreen interface and driver visibility. There’s a maddening synaptic delay between choosing an item on the touchscreen and something happening, as we all experienced with slow home computers in the Dark Ages of the 1990s and later on with early smartphones.
I could picture the gears turning (and, I’m guessing here from my years working in the software business, lots of kludgery between generations of code and/or hardware used over the years in various Hyundai interfaces) inside the poor overworked computer. The HVAC interface gets puzzling, too, though you’d sort that out fast enough if you owned this car. Not a dealbreaker, but in 2022 I expect UIs to be quick and intuitive.
Then there’s the problem of outside visibility from the driver’s seat, especially when parking. One of the most important rules for a car writer with a press vehicle is never curb-rash an alloy wheel, and this gets to be stressful when parking in an urban area where you must get as close to the curb as possible to avoid getting sideswiped by Everclear-swilling yahoos driving primered-out Stanza Altimas rolling on three different-size space-saver spares and one studded snow tire (welcome to the Bay Area!).
Still, we weren’t stressed out and the EV6 is a very, very nice machine for long trips.
The EV6 has cool-looking fender bulges and mean-looking thick pillars—all of which obscure your view—and I found it virtually impossible to line the car up exactly parallel with the curb and within an inch or so (even with the help of the many outside-view cameras, which don’t get down-to-the-inch resolution). This won’t matter at all if you never park in high-vehicle-attrition urban areas, of course, but it drove me nuts.
Now that I’ve gotten the real car review portion of this article out of the way—and I’d like to express my respect for my colleagues who handle that task like bosses every day of the year, because it’s like pulling teeth for me—we’ll get back to the Junkyard/Gambling Winter EV Road Trip Adventure portion of this thing. I visited five self-service wrecking yards during the trip—three in California and two in Nevada.
Hands down, this was the most productive junkyard-photography road trip I’ve ever taken in my life, including some amazing circuits of Phoenix’s top-notch yards. I write for two publications that only pay for my junkyard tales, on top of regular Junkyard Treasures here at Autoweek, which means I must find a minimum of six historically significant doomed cars or trucks (or tanks) per week, every week. I documented more than 60 discarded vehicles that met my strict standards on this trip.
Yes, it’s not all great taco-truck meals and car-parts boomboxes in my junkyard-centric existence (though there are lots of both). On my EV6 trip, I shot such standout junked machinery as a 1973 Citroën SM, a 2011 Nissan Leaf, a 1967 Cadillac Calais, a 1976 BMW 3.0 Si, a 1978 Datsun 510 station wagon, a 1985 Dodge Ram 50 Royal Turbodiesel, a 1986 GMC Jimmy, a 1990 Mazda MPV 4WD, a 1994 Chevrolet Corvette, and many more whose stories have yet to be published.
The car had plenty of range, so the next morning we hit the Reno and Sparks junkyards.
Soon after we departed the Planet Auto Self Serve in Rancho Cordova (a new chain challenging the mighty Pick-n-Pull for Northern California dominance) and had lunch, we began the steep uphill climb into the Sierra Nevada mountains.
The weather dipped below freezing as we ascended, but the EV6’s Range-O-Meter showed the spread—yes, we’ll be using gambling terms whenever possible from this point on—between the car’s estimated remaining range and the distance to our destination hovering around 50 miles. At first.
The total trip distance would be 248 miles, and the fully charged EV6 began its journey showing 313 miles on the Range-O-Meter. I expected the steep grades on I-80 that begin at about Auburn and continue to the Nevada state line to take their toll, of course, and I knew that cold weather reduces the capacity of EV batteries while also using juice to heat the passenger compartment. But I wasn’t prepared for just how fast our predicted-range-to-actual-distance spread would shrink once uphill travel and outside temperatures in the 20s had their effect.
I knew there were public fast-charge stations in Truckee, which is about 35 miles west of Reno, so we probably wouldn’t get stranded. The spread dropped to 25 miles, then 20… and then we got caught in an uphill stop-and-go car jam caused by a crash miles ahead, with the mercury dropping by the second. By the time we got out of that, the spread had dropped below zero and we had to stop and refuel. Yes, 50 miles of cushion evaporated just like that.
Still, we weren’t stressed out and the EV6 is a very, very nice machine for long trips. Compared to, say, one of the worst cars I’ve ever driven between the Bay Area and Reno (a 50-buck 1976 Chevy Nova two-door with wheezing straight-six and automatic) this was like being in an intergalactic starship. Granted, that Nova was able to just stop at any gas station and top off.
I had two smartphone apps for locating EV charging stations, both of which I’d used before with EVs in the inner Bay Area: ChargePoint and PlugShare. But both of these apps sucked when we needed them most.
We were guided to charging stations that don’t exist, wrong locations, incompatible hardware, and you can set all the filters you want and still feel like running over your phone.
Fortunately, Truckee is a small city and we bounced around town until we gave up on the EV apps and used Google Maps to find an Electrify America charging station in a supermarket parking lot.
Of course, we had to try a couple of the chargers before we found one that worked.
And then we recharged the car quickly and easily, just like filling a tank with liquid fuel, right? Not so much. After backing the car into a charger space (the EV6 has the charging point in the rear, unlike most EVs) in a crowded parking lot full of, like hella aggro snowboard bros and their careening 4Runners, we discovered a basic truth about public EV charging stations: Lots of public chargers don’t work.
Maybe they’re just plain dead, maybe they feed you error messages, maybe the hardware is busted. Anyway, after a lot of stressful backing and attempting to fill at a couple non-functioning chargers (remember, this car has not-so-great visibility), we found one that worked and hooked up the car.
At this point, the charging process went smoothly and reasonably quickly. We got a charging speed that peaked at a respectable 130kW and made it to 80% in 26 minutes. On top of that, the cost was just $0.43 per kWh, much cheaper per-mile than gasoline. Later on, at a charging station in Reno, I learned from an EV owner from Truckee that the charger we managed to use was the only one functioning in the whole town (one fun thing about EV charging is that you get to swap stories with other EV owners while you charge).
After that, the trip to Reno was a breeze. We pulled up to the valet at the hotel, like proper whales in our sleek electron-burning South Korean sled—at which point we learned that the Silver Legacy provides EV charging only for Teslas. Yes, one of the unexpected pitfalls of the EV road trip, so make sure your hotel provides the exact hardware specs for any chargers they claim to have on the premises. Good thing we’d charged up 40 miles earlier! We got comped on the valet parking, at least, and the view from our room was good.
Of course, the World Series game got rescheduled due to rain and so we couldn’t bet on it. Instead, we got a few bucks down on pro basketball games and headed out for some pho and beer at a great Vietnamese joint near our hotel.
The car had plenty of range, so the next morning we hit the Reno and Sparks junkyards rather than topping up the batteries for the drive back downhill. The Planet Auto in Reno has some of the friendliest junkyard employees I’ve ever encountered (outside of my favorite Denver yard). If you’re ever in Reno, be sure to drop by Planet Auto and tell them Murilee sent you.
After hitting the Planet Auto and a Pick-n-Pull (which had impressive inventory quality), we figured out the location of an Electrify America station in Reno and went for a full 100% charge.
After that, it was smooth, quiet EV driving back into California.
Of course, we had to try a couple of the chargers before we found one that worked. Then we had to quit that charger because it was only giving us a tiny flow of watts. Eventually we got hooked up to a good charger, then watched a stream of other EV drivers show up and bounce around the chargers in search of a good one.
After that, it was smooth, quiet EV driving back into California. Going downhill made all the difference in the range, this direction.
Back in Alameda, I spent a few more days visiting East Bay junkyards and charged the car up a few more times. During one of those occasions, I learned some EV drivers will pull up to a charger with multiple connectors and plug one into their car, even when you’re using the same charger on a different cable and you’ve already paid.
This immediately kills the charging to your car and switches it to their car. I’m not sure if I paid for a few minutes’ charging to that electric Mini Cooper before I figured out what was going on and had a most unpleasant argument with the owner (“The APP says this charger is AVAILABLE!” she yelled as I unplugged her car), but this seems like Yet Another Drawback in the public-charging EV ecosystem.
It wasn’t long before I was stuffing my bags into the EV6’s cargo area and getting ready to leave. I had developed a real affection for the car during the week I had it.
I learned a few things I’d been curious about. First, steep hills knock back EV range worse than they do with an internal-combustion engine. Second, cold weather really does zap your real-world EV range, though not too badly in the current crop of new EVs.
Third, it is possible to drive an EV and rely entirely on public charging stations, but you’ll need to be patient with the infrastructure until it gets built out a lot more thoroughly.
As for the driving cost, it depends on what you’re paying for a kilowatt-hour but it’s nearly always going to be cheaper than gas or diesel. If I’d been using a residential charger in Alameda with the EV6 getting the 3.6 mi/kWh the car averaged during the week of mostly highway use, it would have cost about $6.11 in electricity per 100 miles driven (and about twice as much when buying the power from Electrify America charging stations).
At 25 miles per gallon of gasoline at $5.899/gallon, that’s $23.60 per 100 miles driven (or $12.67 at the average price per gallon in the United States at the time of this writing).
Maintenance is cheaper with an EV, too, so there’s that.
I’m already shopping for a used Kia Soul EV, to be fueled for free from the solar panels I already have on my roof.
Keyword: Kia EV6 Conquers a Real-World, Cold-Weather Mountain Road Trip